Industry guides

How to get commercial cleaning contracts: a marketing guide

How cleaning companies win commercial contracts: how property managers buy, what your website must prove, which channels work and how to follow up.

October 21, 20266 min read

Commercial cleaning contracts go to the companies that property and facility managers can find quickly, trust on paper, and rely on to follow through. In practice that means four things: show up when a manager searches for a cleaner in your area, prove on your website that you are insured, compliant and experienced with their type of building, make the walkthrough and proposal easy, and keep following up, because many contracts are decided at renewal time, months after the first conversation. Public tenders are a second track with their own rules. This guide covers both.

How commercial cleaning is actually bought

Residential customers buy on price and convenience. Commercial buyers buy on risk. The person choosing you is usually a property manager, a facility manager, an office manager or a condo board, and their main worry is not the hourly rate. It is the phone call from a tenant complaining about overflowing bins, or a cleaner who doesn't show up on a Friday night.

The typical path looks like this:

A trigger. The current cleaner keeps missing things, the contract is up for renewal, a new building or tenant is coming, or a head office asks for competing quotes.
A shortlist. Built from referrals by other managers, a Google search, past bidders, and sometimes a formal request for proposal.
Due diligence. The manager checks your website, reviews, insurance, workers' compensation status and references.
A walkthrough. You visit the site, note square footage, floor types, washrooms, frequency and special areas.
The proposal. Scope, schedule, price, supervision and quality control.
A trial or a start date, followed by a contract that comes up for renewal.

Your marketing has to support every step, not just the first one.

What your website must prove

When a manager lands on your site, they are checking whether you're a safe choice. A site that looks like it hasn't changed in ten years raises the first doubt. Here is what should be there.

A page for each type of facility

Offices, industrial plants and warehouses, medical and dental clinics, condos and residential towers, retail, post-construction cleaning. Each page should say what's included, typical frequencies, and any special requirements you meet (for example, procedures for clinical areas). A manager of a medical building wants to see that you understand medical buildings.

Your service area

List the cities and regions you serve, plainly. It helps the manager and it helps local search.

Proof that lowers risk

Liability insurance, with the amount, and a line saying certificates are available on request.
Workers' compensation status. In Ontario, for example, the WSIB issues a clearance number to businesses that are registered and up to date, valid for up to 90 days, and contractors can request one online. Other provinces have equivalents.
Years in business, number of buildings served, and the types of clients (with permission, a few names or logos).
How you supervise: site inspections, checklists, a single point of contact, response time for complaints.
Real photos of your team and work, not stock images.

A quote form built for commercial buyers

Ask for what you need to prepare a walkthrough: type of building, approximate square footage, desired frequency, preferred time (evenings, weekends), and the best contact. Keep it short. Offer a phone number next to it for managers who prefer to call.

Both languages, where your market needs it

If you serve a bilingual market, each page should exist in both languages, built so that each version can rank on its own.

The channels that bring contracts

Google Business Profile and local search

Managers search for "commercial cleaning" plus a city more often than you might think, especially when they need a replacement quickly. Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and says you can't pay for a better local ranking. Choose the most precise primary category, set your service areas, and ask every satisfied client for a review. Our local SEO guide covers the full checklist.

Google Ads for urgent replacements

Searches like "office cleaning company near me" or "commercial cleaning quote" signal someone ready to switch. A tightly targeted search campaign, limited to your service area and sending people to the right facility page, can work well. Keep residential searches out with negative keywords if you don't do homes.

Direct outreach to property managers

Commercial cleaning is a relationship business. Make a list of the property management firms and buildings in your area, find the manager responsible, and reach out with something specific: a note about a building type you already serve nearby, an offer of a free walkthrough before their renewal date, or a short case example. LinkedIn works well for finding the right person. Keep it personal and brief; a generic mass email gets ignored, and in Canada, commercial emails must follow anti-spam consent rules.

Industry associations

BOMA, the Building Owners and Managers Association, describes its members as building owners and managers across Canada, and it has local associations. Events, sponsorships and committees put you in rooms with exactly the people who sign cleaning contracts. It's slow, but one relationship can lead to a portfolio of buildings.

Public tenders

Governments and public bodies buy cleaning services through open tenders.

Federal: CanadaBuys is the Government of Canada's hub for tender notices. You can search tenders and sign up for notifications.
Provincial and municipal: each province has its own channels. In Quebec, for example, SEAO centralizes notices from ministries, Santé Québec and its establishments, the education network and municipalities.

Tenders are won on compliance and price, with strict formats and deadlines. Start with smaller contracts, read the requirements carefully, and only bid where you can meet every mandatory criterion.

Referrals from current buildings

Your best salespeople are managers who are happy with you. Ask them directly, especially if they manage several properties. A "refer a building" thank-you gesture is fine; make sure it doesn't conflict with their employer's rules.

After the walkthrough: where contracts are won or lost

Many cleaning companies do a good walkthrough and then lose the contract through slow or vague follow-up. A simple discipline:

Proposal within 48 hours, with the scope by area, frequency, schedule, supervision plan and price. Make it easy to compare.
A call two or three days later to walk through it and answer questions.
A check-in one week later with something useful: a reference they can call or a sample inspection checklist.
If the answer is "not now," note the renewal date and contact them a few months before it.

A CRM, even a simple one, keeps every walkthrough, proposal and renewal date in one place so nothing depends on memory. For the general system behind this, see our article on how to get more leads for a service business.

Don't race to the bottom

Lowest price wins some contracts, and loses most of them a year later. Managers who have been burned by a cheap cleaner are often willing to pay more for reliability, if you make that reliability visible. Show your supervision process, your response time, your staff training and your references. Quote clearly what's included, so the comparison is fair. If a prospect only wants the lowest price, it is often better to let that one go.

A real example

DC Maintenance has cleaned commercial, industrial and residential spaces across Quebec since 1990. Its website, though, hadn't changed since 2014: ten hand-maintained pages in two languages, outdated code and no mobile layout. For a company selling reliability to building managers, the site was sending the opposite message. We rebuilt it as 28 pages in French and English, each language tagged so both markets rank on their own, with a page per service, the company's first sitemap and structured data, a refreshed brand built from its 1990 crest, and a lead capture setup that needs no maintenance. The DC Maintenance case study shows the result.

Where PNE fits

Our digital marketing work for cleaning companies combines the pieces above: local SEO and Google Business Profile, search campaigns aimed at commercial buyers, and landing pages built around facility types. We work with service businesses, including cleaning companies, and the website side is covered by our website design service.